Towards a multi-scale virtual heart model

Abstract

This paper presents a three-dimensional multiscale structure and object-oriented model to generate a synthetic heart. This model consists of a series of elementary objects at different resolution level from the macro- to the micro-scale. Each object is described by a vector of attributes. The shapes and size of the components of the tissue are inspired from Synchrotron Radiation Phase micro-Computed Tomography (SR-PCT) of human left ventricle wall samples. To enhance the similarity between the model and the experimental data, we use a Free-Form Deformation (FFD) technique to deform each object. Our first results demonstrate that the model can simulate realistic voxel-based elementary objects and simulate experimental data and shapes. The hierarchical graph structure of the model that includes inter level relationships has a strong potential interest.